What makes this model interesting is that beside the usual Celeron N4000/N4100 dual/quad core processor, it also offers the most powerful yet less common Pentium Silver N5000, and support for up to 16GB RAM via two SO-DIMM slots despite competitors and motherboards manufacturers claiming a maximum of 8GB on their Gemini Lake hardware, even two memory slots are available.

The HDD / SSD bay is located right under the enclosure and secured with two screws. The mini PC can run Windows 10 or Linux, but it’s unclear whether the company will ship the device with Linux pre-installed. NotebookItalia was at the exhibition, filmed a short video of the computer, and mentioned sales are slated to start in May at an undisclosed price. [Update: It appears to be an update of their KODLIX N42-C Apollo Lake mini PC]

If you consider that the old Atom x5/x7 chips supported more RAM than Intel specified, this most likely has nothing to do with dual channel or not. Intel often doesn’t officially support a lot of things that still work. Take memory speeds on desktop PCs as an example. Officially Intel only supports DDR4-2666, yet it’s no problem to run DDR4-3200 or even faster in many consumer motherboards, as long as the motherboard manufacturer has implemented it on a UEFI level.

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9 months ago

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H.Chin

However, for practical testing, the advantages of dual-channel will be even more advanced.

They wrote that for some of their other SoC too, but they can still support 16GB. So the limitation might be 8GB per channel.
What makes me doubt it for Gemini Lake are those motherboards with two SO-DIMM slots that are also limited to 8GB max.

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9 months ago

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H.Chin

Yes, I think your opinion. I checked the N5000’s CPU. It allows dual-channel. Perhaps KODLIX supports Gemini Lake’s motherboard with dual channels. The maximum channel size is 8GB and 8+8=16. In fact, the dual channel speed is much faster than the single channel.